Habitat conservation planning under the Endangered Species Act: is it ecosystem management?

Abstract

Habitat conservation planning under the Endangered Species Act has been compared to ecosystem management by Secretary of Interior, Bruce Babbitt. Yet, ecosystem management, an emerging paradigm for public lands management, has not been defined or criteria established for determining if actions indeed follow it. This thesis addresses ecosystem management through the review of current literature and develops a set of criteria that fall into the following five topic areas: ecological orientation, time and spatial scales, human roles in management, management actions, and data collection. After a comparison of the criteria to five case studies of habitat conservation plans, it is determined that habitat conservation planning is not ecosystem management. A discussion of how habitat conservation planning could be more like ecosystem management further concludes that the Endangered Species Act may not be the only appropriate place for ecosystem management legislation to be. Local and state governments may be better suited to address ecosystem management in the context of habitat conservation planning.